Lets ignore the us / them aspect. I would be interested to know if people think its realistic to get one of these jobs withut military experience. I once called medical aviation services (who supply a large proportion of the EMS geezers in the UK) to be told they employ 82 pilots of which 80 were ex-military. Apparently most of the customers insist the pilots are ex-military.
Anyone out there not ex-mil and doing this job. If so I think we'd be interested to hear how you did it and what hoops you had to jump through in process.